Strong and Moving!

So much average

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

The original Invasion of the Saucer Men was no masterpiece, but it's generally agreed that this remake is far worse.Most of the intentional humor is pretty lame, and there's an amateurish quality about the film-making that at least proves the original movie was competently done.That being said, it must be admitted that this movie does manage to be kind of entertaining, if you have nothing better to do some evening.The young couple make a cute pair.The familiar presence of AIP leading man John Ashley is like meeting up with an old friend, and the sweet young thing played by Cynthia Hull is really pretty and appealing.It's fun to see how much of the music you can identify from other movies. In a couple of romantic scenes, there's an instrumental version playing of a song Annette Funicello sang in one of the Beach Party movies. When people are dancing at the bar, there's an instrumental from AIP's Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. And I'm convinced a lot of the scary music is taken from Roger Corman's The Undead. Whether all this was intended as a sort of inside joke, or just making use of stock music, I don't know. I'm also pretty sure that there's at least some music from Hammer's Dracula, Prince of Darkness.The movie is kind of fun, if you don't have high expectations. Though made in the mid-Sixties, it has a sort of Fifties feel to it not too different from the original version.

A bunch of evil and deadly aliens land in the remote woods of a sleepy rural community and terrorize the countryside. It's up to decent, clean-cut youth Stan Kenyon (handsome, smooth-voiced John Ashley) and his sweet girlfriend Susan Rogers (fetching brunette honey Cynthia Hull) to stop them before it's too late. Limply directed in a flat style and with an appalling lack of finesse by notorious Grade Z blunder wonder Larry Buchanan, with static cinematography by Ralph K. Johnson, lousy and unconvincing (markedly less than) special effects, a drawn-out and meandering narrative (the pace plods along at an agonizingly gradual crawl), a numbing excess of dreary dialogue, stiff acting (top thespic dishonors go to Warren Hammack as smug smartaleck Lieutenant Robertson and Tony Huston as the bumbling Corporal Culver), irritating inept comic relief Air Force officers, cardboard characters, an alternately droning or overwrought stock film library score, and no tension or momentum to speak of, this spectacularly shoddy lemon makes for an enjoyably atrocious piece of outright irredeemable schlock. The ugly, lumpy, lumbering titular extraterrestrial monsters are laughably pathetic; they're obviously guys in hokey rubber suits covered with cheesy eyeballs and sporting painfully visible zippers! Buchanan regular Bill Thurman pops up in a small part sans lines as an Air Force sergeant. An absolutely cruddy hoot.

A TV remake of "Invasion of the Saucer Men". Now while "Invasion..." is hardly a great movie it looks like "Gone With the Wind" compared to this! I saw it nonstop on TV when I was about 10--a local TV station showed it continuously. I liked it then--but I WAS only 10! Seeing it now I was astounded--but not in a good way. Lousy acting (although John Ashley DOES try), stupid plot, TERRIBLE dialogue and some of the most uproariously stupid-looking monsters I've ever seen. It's the kind of film you just watch slack-jawed in amazement--amazed that anything this bad was made! Halfway through this I started laughing and didn't stop till the movie was over. Truly--this is movie-making at its absolute nadir. A must-see--just to see how NOT to make a movie.

Unlike what a previous reviewer said about this film being a ripoff of Roger Corman's films, it is not. AIP, who owned all the films Corman did during the 50s, decided they were going to remake these films as cheaply as possible ($30,000) and sell the to television. So, AIP hired Texas filmmaker Larry Buchanan and had him film Zontar the Thing from Venus,Curse of the Swamp Creature, In the Year 2889 ,Creature of Destruction ,and The Eye Creatures. These were all remakes of 50's AIP films. Yes, these films are all hastily made messes, and yes they are bad, but in an entertaining way. I for one miss by-the-seat-of-your-pants film-making, as well as miss the master, Larry Buchanan.